


In the Valley of the Shadow of Death

by NervousAsexual



Category: Jonny Quest
Genre: Accidents, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Cyberpunk, Gen, Illness, Implied Relationships, Kinda, Major Character Injury, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-20 17:10:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6017971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NervousAsexual/pseuds/NervousAsexual
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a horrific accident, Race is not quite able to fit all the pieces back together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Valley of the Shadow of Death

The advertisements from the CDC were extra kid-friendly that year. One featured a dinosaur in a cape fighting germs - viruses and bacteria alike - with laser vision and the ability to fly. The outbreaks in the Pacific Northwest had a child mortality rate of nearly sixteen percent among unvaccinated kids under the age of eighteen.  
That was the year Race and Benton began to drift apart.

Race didn't notice at first. A lot of folks stopped touching during flu season. The boys still roughhoused with him, but his handlers at Intelligence One no longer shook his hand. He finally noticed one afternoon, as he sat painstakingly typing in the coordinates of an outgoing transmission and it occurred to him that Benton's bad left hand was resting on the back of his chair and not on his shoulder. In fact, he could not remembered the last time Benton had actually physically touched him.

"You're not too worried about the flu this year, are you?" he asked.

Benton put the handwritten coordinates aside. He pinched the bridge of his nose, something Race had noticed him doing a lot since the accident.

"Thanks for reminding me," he said. "I've been meaning to ask you to take the boys for their vaccinations. The CDC is predicting to run low this year. I'd... I'd kill myself if anything were to happen to them."

Race ignored that. "Doctor, you aren't getting one?"

Benton turned away and busied himself with gathering the coordinates again. "We'll see, Race. For now I want you and the boys set. In case we're called away."

"Sure. Just in case."

He ran the conversation back and forth in his head that night after lights out and wondered if he should be relating it all to Corvin. That is his job, after all, to protect Dr. Quest not just from other but from himself.

No, he finally decided. If they thought a man like Dr. Quest could survive an accident like that and emerge on the other end unscathed, they didn't need to be called intelligence agents.

God, he could not believe anyone could have survived that accident. He'd been with the boys at the time, helping them with Latin, of all things - what a joke! As if they needed to know Latin, and even so Hadji could easily have taken over for him. But they were there on the beach, the warm sun beating down on their shoulders. They could have been on the verge of an Egyptian adventure.

"Aw, Race," Jonny complained. "Why do we have to learn this stuff? At least people speak Spanish. Or Hadji could teach me to speak Indian."

"Bengali," Hadji corrected. Three books lay open around him; a dictionary, a grammar and an old Latin copy of the bible.

"Right, right. Hadji told me that, like 3% of all the people all the people in the world speak it."

He would have sympathised but at that moment the shock waves slammed him to the ground.

He saw Jonny talking but can't make out the words, saw Hadji stagger to his feet only to tip wildly and fall.

"Stay," he yelled to the boys, though he could barely hear himself. In his head he knew they were protesting. As he got to his hands and knees, earthy tilting violently beneath him, he shouted. "No games, boys, just STAY HERE."

The southern part of the complex was in flames, debris strewn down the beach as far as he could see. He ran, the world still tilting, hot sand sliding beneath his feet.

The door was blastproof. He shoved it aside and it swung easily a foot before catching on the remains of a machine. The heat tore into his face and lungs.

Sharp he saw first. Obviously dead, not four feet from the scorched lab table. He lay across another counter. His face was gone, just gone, melted, and it was worse than anything Race had ever seen, unrecognizable.

"Dr. Quest," he shouted into the smoke. "Benton, if you're still in here I need you to..."

Then he saw it, as his lungs threatened to collapse in, the white of Benton's lab coat, and the spattered blood bubbling on the wall behind him.

"Benton!" he shouted again. His feet burned and Benton didn't move. He looked utterly limp--either unconscious or dead. Race refused to think of it. He shoved aside the shelving unit that lay in the way. Underneath it was worse than he could have imagined.

Benton lay on his stomach, his blackened, mangled left arm twisted behind his back and his hand nearly severed above the wrist. His face was turned away and when Race touched it, trying to support his head as he rolled him to his back, it was bruised and pulpy and scarred with shrapnel, and it looked as if every bone in his face were broken. His left eye was partially open, eyeball pressing against unanchored skin. Race's blood ran cold.

 

The decisions were made farther up the chain of command in I-1, presumably because Race was already under a great deal of stress and being treated for smoke inhalation, was having broken glass plucked from his feet at the precise time of the decision, and Dr Quest, still unconscious, was handed over to Dr Ernest Kellaway, a brain specialist visiting the facility on the mainland. Race knew nothing about him. In the months during and following his recovery Dr Quest rarely spoke of him.

Race brought the boys in three weeks after the accident, when Kellaway's assistant phoned him with the OK.

Dr Quest had looked far less authoritative with his hair all shaved off. He had been sitting in the day area in front of the television, left arm bound up and out of his way, mouth hanging slightly open and eyes at half mast. The boys sat beside him like sentries, Jonny on the right and Hadji on the left.

They asked so many questions but Benton answered slowly, mostly in single syllables. He was 90% deaf in his left ear, and in a few short days Dr Kellaway operated again, this time to remove his left eye and fit Benton for a prosthetic.

The boys needed no encouragement to avoid asking about the mass of stitches stretching across Benton's head. There was talk in the dead of night, Hadji's nightmares, Jonny's anxieties, but Race was only grateful they hadn't seen him lying on the beach that day, as Race held his head to drain the blood from his lungs and knew in his heart the doctor was dying.

 

 

Benton was not at breakfast in the morning. Race found him at one of the lab tables, head tucked in his arm and snoring softly. A small centrifuge and an assortment of vials stood around his head like a halo. Race considered touching his shoulder, but as he reached out Benton gave a jerk and woke himself.

"Race," he said as Race situated himself in his line of sight. He spoke in the monotone that the speech therapist warned might never entirely go away. "Would you bring me a cotton swab from the cupboard?"

He fetched the swab and Benton ran it along the inside of his right cheek.

"How you feeling, sir?" Race asked quietly.

Benton put the swab into a saline canister and began setting up the centrifuge. "Honestly, Race, I've been better."

"You don't think this is a reaction to the flu shot?"

"I didn't have one."

"Benton..."

"No, no, I know where this is leading. I can't, Race. Not for the foreseeable future. At least not without... complications."

"That's what these..." he gestured at the swab as Benton popped the saline into the centrifuge, "is for? You're sick."

"I don't know that. As long as you and the boys are inoculated we have a kind of herd immunity. It'll be just a matter of taking more precautions."

The centrifuge whirred and they both fell silent. Benton scratched along his jaw where the beard had once been, and in the relative silence the sound of nails on flesh made the tiny hairs on Race's arms stand on end. The faint hum of the lights felt like a blessing.

"There's no need to be upset," Benton said quietly.

"I'm not upset. I just need to keep my bases covered."

"I appreciate that."

Finally Benton clicked the centrifuge off. He siphoned the top layer into a petri dish and tapped a bit of an unlabeled chemical into the rest. After a minute, the mixture tinged slightly blue.

"Looks like we're in the clear," Benton said, but his voice was so flat Race thought he sounded almost disappointed.

 

 

Benton slept a lot after the accident, which left Race essentially the face of the operation. He sent the updates to I-1 and Benton's colleagues. He disciplined and fed the boys.

And once, on a day he'd hoped to hell would never come, he spoke to Dr Sharp's nearly orphaned daughter. What could he say to her? Benton never spoke of the accident, but based on his injuries versus those of his friend and colleague, Race could only assume that Dr Sharp had been the catalyst.

Once a week they boarded the dragonfly and flew to the mainland for Benton's physical therapy. They were climbing aboard on the grey drizzly day that Jade arrived by boat.

"What are you doing here?" he'd asked her as they met on the dock.

She took a last draw from her cigarette and flicked it into the water. "The flu outbreak in Hong Kong. I want to know what you gentlemen do, and I would prefer to find out in person." She turned to Benton and smiled, and held out her arms from her waist. "Benton, old man, you're looking altogether healthy."

Benton smiled faintly but stepped away. "I'm afraid I don't know much more than you do. I haven't been in the CDC's loop for several years."

She nodded. "I was afraid it would come to this. Boys, my people are dying. I'm going to need more than that."

"There's nothing we can do," Race told her, taking her arm, but she pulled away.

"Benton," she said, coming in close even as Benton closed his eyes and turned away. "Benton, is there any way to get vaccines? My friends can't pay, but I can get you anything you want."

He whispered, "I'm sorry."

"There has to be more to it than that."

He pulled Benton into the plane and they left her standing on the dock, staring up at them with the last shreds of her defiance pulled around her like a cloak.

"I hope she doesn't bother the boys," Race said, but Benton didn't answer.

 

 

 

Water. All around him. Water. How? The storm. Off the starboard side. He didn't have time to react. Barely got himself and Benton out of the wreckage. Now here they are in the cold, cold water, jerking them this way and that and Benton is cool in his arms. He lays back in the water, praying they can both stay afloat and that somehow he can get them - god willing - nearer to the main land. He doesn't dare look down at Benton. The salt water burns at his nose and throat and lungs.

"I should have killed myself," Benton says softly, "while I had the chance."

"Quiet." He is trying to think. He's survived this before, just like the Sea Quest's explosion. If he can only find some wreckage.

"Race, let me go."

"The boys need you."

"No."

"Benton, you can not leave Jonny like Sharp left Polly." He brings his arms up under Benton's shoulders. Hopefully the water won't jostle him free.

"I can't be vulnerable like this. Not anymore."

"Lay your head back against me. We've got to save our strength."

In response Benton smashes his head into Race's mouth. He struggles to free his arms but Race tightens his grip and there is no where to go. "Race, please. Let me go."

He tastes blood.

Benton coughs and gags on the sea water until finally the thrashing ceases and he is still in Race's arms.

"Doctor."

"There's things..." Benton's voice barely carries over the sound of the waves. "There's things the human body shouldn't come back from."

"Kelleway brought you back. You were gone."

"I know."

It's a struggle to keep just his head above water.

"Race, I'm not the only one he's brought back. Sharp, he..."

What would float? What from the plane would float?

"He had a son once. And Kelleway..."

Race pulls his forearm tight across Benton's throat and braces against the feeble struggling until at last Benton is silent. He prays to god they won't die out here. Not again.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. So this was originally supposed to take place in a cyberpunk future. So much for that, eh? Just imagine this is the future the anti-vaxxers built for us.
> 
> 2\. If it says CDI, I meant CDC but my terminal geekiness is showing.


End file.
